ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers

Ivan Stelmakh, Yi Luan, Bhuwan Dhingra, Ming-Wei Chang

Abstract
Recent progress on open domain factoid question answering (QA) does not easily transfer to the task of long-form QA, where the goal is to answer questions that require in-depth explanations. The hurdles include a lack of high-quality data and the absence of a well-defined notion of an answer’s quality. In this work, we address these problems by releasing a novel dataset and a task that we call ASQA (Answer Summaries for Questions which are Ambiguous); and proposing a reliable metric for measuring performance on ASQA. Our task focuses on ambiguous factoid questions which have different correct answers depending on the interpretation. Answers to ambiguous questions should combine factual information from multiple sources into a coherent long-form summary that resolves the ambiguity. In contrast to existing long-form QA tasks (such as ELI5), ASQA admits a clear notion of correctness: a user faced with a good summary should be able to answer different interpretations of the original ambiguous question. Our analysis demonstrates an agreement between this metric and human judgments, and reveals a considerable gap between human performance and strong baselines.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.566
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8273–8288
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.566
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.566
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ivan Stelmakh, Yi Luan, Bhuwan Dhingra, and Ming-Wei Chang. 2022. ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8273–8288, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ASQA: Factoid Questions Meet Long-Form Answers (Stelmakh et al., EMNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2022.emnlp-main.566.pdf
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